Free Build and Test Acceleration Tool: ElectricAccelerator Huddle

By Adrian Bridgwater, June 26, 2014

Continuous Delivery boost, right at the front end of the pipe

ElectricAccelerator Huddle is a new free product for software builds and tests. In public beta now, the software's magic comes from its tapping of unused desktop CPU capacity within a peer-to-peer group of developers to distribute builds and tests, and reduce cycle times.

"The result [here] is a supercharging of the front-end of the Continuous Delivery process. Continuous Delivery isn't continuous if builds and tests take hours to complete. Smaller development teams may not be able to have a dedicated pool of server resources for build and test acceleration, but they almost all use 4- or 8-core desktops or laptops," said Rohit Jainendra, chief product officer for Electric Cloud.

"Huddle brings the power of ElectricAccelerator to these teams in a "freemium" offering, allowing them to create a virtual pool of resources to accelerate build and tests, using unused CPU capacity in a way that is easy to deploy and manage."

Electric Cloud likes to call Continuous Delivery "the new Agile" and says that its product can directly address the reliability and risk issues of releasing software faster within increasingly complex environments.

With Huddle and Electric Cloud teams can accelerate builds and tests, for free, forever, on up to eight local cores — or parallelize and distribute them across multiple machines up to a limited number of hours.

The product allows programmers to ensure correct builds through build dependency management and filesystem isolation. Users can add new members to the huddle and increase the available pool of virtual build and test resources — they can also plug Huddle into an existing environment with no recoding or reconfiguration. There is the option to opt-in or out of a huddle at any time to control the amount of CPU cycles being shared.

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